Il ritorno di Godzilla

This was obviously made because Toho wanted to discover new plot elements for their kaiju film formula, which was falling into something of a predictable rut (humans fight humans, humans fight monster, monster fights monster, sayonara). But simply limiting the amount of time the monsters appear on screen offers no improvement.

"Sea Monster" is one of the weaker entries in the original Godzilla series. Much of the film is directed as light comedy, a mild satire on the James Bond films. Actually, the comedy works pretty well; it's never knee-slapping laugh-out-loud, but it finds and sustains a level of humor most viewers should find fairly easy to live with.

The monsters here are almost tossed in for deus-ex-machina plot devices, saving the day at the last moment. To be sure, it's amusing to see Godzilla sit around pondering what to do with the woman he's just saved from bad guys, but there really isn't much for him to do here. He zaps a giant vulture, pulls the claws off a lobster and smashes a nuclear power plant - and that's about it. For a minute towards the end, it almost looks like things will get complicated by a battle between Godzilla and Mothra, but this doesn't really amount to much either.

For Godzilla completists, it's a relatively harmless sub-par entry - it certainly doesn't scrape the same bottoms as "Godzilla's Revenge" or "vs. Megalon". But if you are not yet a Big G. fan, this should not be your introduction to the series.

Entertaining fluff, nothing more.

This is the second Godzilla movie to this point that wasn't directed by Ishiro Honda (first being Godzilla Raids Again), and was directed by Jun Fukuda. Fukuda chose Masaru Sato to compose the music instead of Akira Ifukube, and overall contributes to the lighter touch. Shinichi Sekizawa's screenplay continues on the trend of humanizing the monsters, and Ebira's pose before the battle is a caricature of the then popular professional wrestler Toyonobori, and Godzilla rubbing his index finger on his nose is a caricature of Yuzo Kayama's character in Wakadaisho series which usually played at same time as the Godzilla movies as a double feature. The cinematography is noticeably brighter and the characters are also bit more easy going than Honda's version of Godzilla movies.

Ryota (Tetsu Watanabe) who lost his brother in the South Pacific in a fishing boat accident believes in the prediction made by a spiritual medium in Mt. Osore that his brother is still alive. He comes out to Tokyo to look for a way to get to his brother. There he meets few college students and later a thief named Yoshimura (Akira Takarada) in a sailboat they've snuck into. While everyone's asleep, Ryota sets sail to the south pacific to search for his brother. In a stormy sea the sailboat runs aground on an island occupied by a gang who calls themselves the "Red Bamboo". Red Bamboo is kidnapping the residents of Infant Island (Mothra Island) as slave labor to further their cause. Dayo (Kumi Mizuno) a girl from Infant Island escapes into the jungle and meets Ryota and Yoshimura's crew. There they hide in a cave to escape Red Bamboo's pursuit. Unbeknownst to them, that cave contained a hibernating Godzilla. Yoshimura comes up with a novel plan to wake Godzilla and turn it against the Red Bamboo.

In this movie, the fairies that talks to Mothra also changed from The Peanuts (Emi and Yumi Ito) to another twins Pair Bambi (Yuko and Yoko Okada - born 4/19/1944 Nagoya Japan). They were already 15 year veteran in the show business when they stared in this movie. Originally, Noriko Takahashi was to play the part of Dayo, but fell ill to appendicitis so was changed to Kumi Mizuno at the last minute. Mizuno who was 29 at the time played the role written for a 19 year old girl. Takahashi 6 month earlier played a similar role in Tsuburaya Production's Ultra Q series as a native girl who lost her brother to a giant octopus.

In the mid to late sixties, Godzilla movie started to slide to a lighter stories. This movie took the formula one step further from the previous Godzilla move the "Monster Zero", and continues the humanization of Godzilla and the monsters. Jun Fukuda's directing isn't up to par with Honda's and the props look cheezy by comparison which took away from the story, but most likely the movie was intended for kids and this was part of their production plan. The good in this movie was Akira Takarada and Kumi Mizuno that brought character to acting. Overall the movie succeeded because these two characters kept the focus. Good entertainment from the '60s Toho studio.

This is a most unusual Godzilla flick. To be exact a low budget affair with no big city to destroy with Godzilla doing his battle on an island. The story line is a little James Bond-ish, but we know Godzilla is the reason we are watching. The story line is of no real concern as long as Godzilla does his thing.

A group of young men take out on a sailboat in attempts to find a long lost brother shipwrecked and thought lost at sea. The would be rescue party ends up shipwrecked themselves on an island that is guarded by Ebirah, a giant mutant lobster-like creature, thus GODZILLA vs THE SEA MONSTER(USA title).Also on the island is a militia base that is producing nuclear bombs to overtake the world with. Godzilla is awakened from his nap in a cave to take on the sea monster and destroy the evil soldiers and their bomb factory.

My favorite scene is where Godzilla and Ebirah appear to be playing ping pong with a boulder during their showdown. Actually this is one of Godzilla's easiest foes to whip. Maybe to help in cutting production costs.

The low budget was due to the fact that at the time TV viewers were lowering movie theater attendance. This did not seem to effect the popularity of this particular Godzilla outing.

Almost all Kaiju flicks involve two story lines, the story of the little guys and the story of the monsters. This is one of them where the story of the little guys is what really matters. A distinctly B movie, half-espionage and half-island-action, about a guy's search for his brother and getting caught up with a gang of various other guys and a beautiful native to stave off an organization's evil deeds in the South pacific. Pretty scenery. Pretty natives. Some fair jokes and some good 1960's style cheese action. Even Ebirah, a jumbo jumbo shrimp who guards the island, more or less, works well enough as a background piece. It is when the big piece of seafood tries to take center stage that things start slowing down.

By the time Godzilla shows up, the movie suffers from the monsters. Not only does the original Japanese soundtrack have a habit of playing just about the most inappropriate music for all of his scenes (look, jets are coming, let's play surf rock...he's smashing a base, let's play slow horror mood music); but there is the distinct problem the director has in getting the transition from Godzilla as a monster to a potential hero down right. Too often, Godzilla's actions make no sense. He seems to like people in one scene. In the next, he is randomly destroying things again.

The movies final problem is the Kaiju fights sort of repeat themselves. Whether it be the two monsters throwing rocks back and forth more than once, or the exact same "flip" later on, it does seem a little out of place.

This is one of the first Godzilla movies I saw, and when I see it now after seeing almost all of the other movies, it still holds up pretty well. The main problem is, of course, Ebirah. Definetly Godzilla's worst foe. I mean, really, A GIANT LOBSTER!? But, other than that, the film is quite good, following the usual trend that the Godzilla movies tend to have much better plots than their american counterparts of the time. Here we have a young man trying to find his brother taking his friends with him to look at boats. When they board one to look around, they find a man with a gun to greet them. He claims to be the owner and allows them to spend the night on the boat. When they wake up the next morning, however, the young man has taken the boat to find his brother. It's wrecked in a storm and they are stranded on an island where they discover a secret organisation called the Red Bamboo is using slave labor to make nuclear weapons. Ebirah, a giant lobster, prevents boats from entering or leaving the island, and Okondoru, a giant condor, prevents planes from arriving. The man who claimed to own the boat, Yoshimura, turns out to be both a thief and the most resourceful member of their little group (which now also includes an escaped slave played by the wonderful Kumi Mizuno). They discover that Godzilla is sleeping on the island, so they wake him up in order to stop the Red Bamboo. He trashes the base, defeats the two other, ahem, monsters, and the slaves and group are all saved by Mothra (who really isn't looking to good by now). The thief, Yoshimura, is definetly my favorite character in this, and the special effects are pretty good at times (he may be a pathetic monster, but Ebirah looks great). As a bonus, it also makes for a great MST3K episode.